[4203] in Release_7.7_team
locker sofware on OpenAFS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Mon Feb 2 20:00:27 2004
Message-Id: <200402030100.i1310MX9026455@dit.mit.edu>
To: jdreed@MIT.EDU, ops@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, facdev@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 20:00:21 -0500
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
I'm starting to adapt the major Third Party software lockers to run on
OpenAFS. So far I have the java, xess and maple lockers working.
I created a new, small locker called afsutil to contain various
Athena-specific utilities my launch scripts use so OpenAFS clients can
get to them (I link to there from the various locker bin dirs). At
the moment all it contains is athdir and machtype.
Matlab will echo a message telling users "not available yet" pending
getting licensing issues resolved (when I get to it); pretty much
everything else with the exception of Numerical Recipes should be OK.
I found it convenient to use a modified copy of the afslocker script as
primary launch script- I just added a few lines at the bottom:
PATH=$lockermount/arch/@sys/bin:$PATH; export PATH
if test ${MANPATH-undefined} = "undefined"
then
MANPATH=$lockermount/man
else
MANPATH=$lockermount/man:$MANPATH
fi
export MANPATH
xterm &
and I launch the application in the xterm that this causes to open (I first
tried gnome-terminal instead of xterm but the gnome-terminal doesn't
inherit the modified path for some reason).
I was able to get Athena printing working but at the cost of installing about
half a dozen Athena rpms. I don't know if we want to advise users to do
that, but even if we don't they'll probably start experimenting on their
own...
I anticipate some complications for apps that put a lot of local
configuration in user's home directories, like Star Office. I also see
issues given the possibility of users having two home directories now,
their AFS one and the default RedHat local one in /home. I'm inclined
to let whatever $HOME is decide which it will be.
Alex
